


Squeevening's Fanfic Author Interview for N&B 2020

by Squeevening



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Author Interview, Not a fanfic, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-30
Updated: 2020-04-30
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:00:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23931949
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Squeevening/pseuds/Squeevening
Summary: Hey guys: I was asked to fill this out for the Nerds & Beyond Fanfic panel.  I’m not sure what the intended use was for this survey - maybe it was to decide if they wanted to invite folks? Anyhoo, not sure,  but I spent a goodly amount of time writing essay answers, so I am sharing my answers in case any of my readers are interested. :-DThe questions are by N&B the answers are mine.***This interview contains spoilers about some of my works***I have a new work ALMOST DONE I swear, a new Bunker Quarantine fic a week out, tops. <3
Comments: 4
Kudos: 8





	Squeevening's Fanfic Author Interview for N&B 2020

**Are you a writer by trade, or is writing fan fiction a hobby or something you do in your spare time?**

I am a Database Engineer by trade. Fan fiction is something that’s become a bit of an obsession that eats up every spare minute I have. I’d like to write professionally just to get more time to do it, but I’m not sure I could replace my current income.

**How long have you been writing? How many works have you completed/words have you written?**

I’ve been writing fan fiction for two years this April. I am a slow writer, but I have put in a ton of hours, and in that time I have written 320k words that are published, and 95k that are not out yet.

My first work was a 300k novel, my second book in that series is an unpublished work currently at 80k, and I have a few short stories out. I’m working on a novella right now that was supposed to be a short story but these things seem to have a mind of their own. :-)

**What got you into writing fan-fiction? Do you write across different fandoms or only one? If so, which ones? Do you have favorites?**

This is kind of a two-part answer for me. I write exclusively Supernatural fanfiction at the moment. For several years I have suffered from extreme insomnia, and reading a chapter story I knew very well could help me calm my mind at night. I have several favorite authors, but much as I loved any particular story I would eventually wear it out, and it wouldn’t work to quiet my mind anymore. I have a particular note I prefer to read, which is the same note that Supernatural the show hits. Shimmering beauty up top, but that deep iceberg of pain below, that visceral chord that makes it feel real and painful and alive. So, eventually, I struck out to write what I needed to read. And then I discovered that I just wanted to see these characters HAPPY for a hot minute, and that’s the second reason I write. :-) 

**What kind of fan-fiction do you like to write? This could be genre, style, tropes, AU vs canon-verse, etc.**

My first huge story was an alternate Universe exploring the notion of Castiel being a demisexual human, and what a slowly blossoming romance between friends might look like when neither understood they were falling in love. I love friends-to-lovers tropes, and as a old married person I grow weary of meet!cute stories across all forms of media. I wanted to see a story that explored past the first kiss. The first disagreement. Making a relationship work through difficulties and differences. Putting the *work* in, which I find extremely underrepresented in popular culture. I believe love is a choice we make every day, when we continue to choose the person we are with. I wanted to honor that with a decent, kind of slow-motion, loving treatment. I’ve also dabbled in a few canon verse short stories and I am writing a bunker quarantine story right now since a lot of us are quarantined. I expect to write quite a few more short stories once I finish my second book. :-)

**Where do you find inspiration for your stories?**

I take inspiration everywhere. From life, from people I've known, truths I’ve learned, dreams, ideas I have in the night. Songs that make me feel a certain way, a poem, a lyric, an idea that won’t leave me from anything else. Writing is like solving a puzzle for me and once I retrained my brain that this is what we’re doing, I lost all interest in playing board games, which I used to enjoy, to focus on this. I’ve read a number of books on writing by Chuck Wendig and Anne Lamott among others, and I am currently taking Neil Gaiman’s masterclass, between writing and work.

**Have you ever collaborated with other creators like writers, artists, musicians, designers etc to create more sensory experiences for your readers? Tell us about that.**

I consider my Beta readers to be creators as well, since their input is absolutely integral to my process. Other than their input, I am an eldest child and a bit controlling, so I have not done any other collaborations. I have several visuals I would love to commission as drawings, but have not made that happen yet.

**Do you have playlists you listen to while writing? Do you make playlists for individual stories or ships?**

Absolutely. I can’t write in silence, but the music has to work with the state my brain wants to be in to write. I need kind of an ambient wall of sound, but I have to know what’s coming next so it isn’t jarring, it’s hard to describe. I just about wore out both of AU4s albums on my first book, listened to a ton of OSI, and recently I have been playing Henry Jamison on repeat. My first book was inspired by a song.

**Tell us about your writing process. For example, how much research do you do before you begin, do you outline your story into acts/chapters/other, do you track your progress or set writing goals for yourself or do you just sit down when something strikes and write things as it comes to you? What's your beta/editing process like?**

Oh gosh. Well, it depends on the setting but I try to be a thousand percent accurate so I do tons and tons of research. I’ll consult maps. I’ll research botany or car engines or whatever the subject at hand is. I’ve briefly interviewed people with the experience I need to know about, I’ve called or emailed businesses with research questions for things that happened in the past, I am *thorough*. My research notes document for my first book was thirty-eight pages long by itself.

I write from a simple outline, often jumping around within that outline if I get stuck on any one part, so let’s look at a simple chapter, for example let’s say I have a chapter that contains an emotional love scene. I’ll rough that chapter in, get all the dialogue just right, the location, the mood the setting, and try to get it to feel the way I want it to feel, be that poignant or nervous or delicate or soft or sweet or three-alarm fire heated, or maybe all those things at once, which is kind of my specialty. Usually I’ll hate it, it won’t feel right, it’ll be off, and I’ll glare at it for a while. Rearrange a few sentences. The dialogue usually all stays in some form but maybe it’s in the wrong order, or the phrasing doesn’t sing to me. I’ll get it rough, but okay.

Then I hand it off to my Emotional Beta. I have an emotional Beta. I asked her to Beta for me early on because we seemed to feel the same way about a lot of things and I knew it was a huge ask and she wasn’t sure about this, but she said yes, and we’ve been working together for two years and she is absolutely wonderful. I couldn’t do this without her, or at least I wouldn’t want to. 

My Emotional Beta comes back once she’s read it and we have a little book club and she *tells me how the chapter made her feel*. Grammar and phrasing are not discussed. If she doesn’t come away feeling what I meant to evoke, I know it isn’t done, and I give it another pass. She sometimes has had to suffer through as many as four passes just to get the emotion right, and she is a Saint and an Angel.

Once the emotion is right I know we’re cooking with gas, and I’ll give it a couple passes for the beauty of the sentences, and if it’s a sexy chapter, for heat. We have a little running joke where I try to estimate the percentage of heat I managed to notch it up by - usually between five to ten percent in any given pass - and that’s just fun to see if we agree.

On book one I also had a wonderful Grammar Beta who will fine-tooth the work for grammar and punctuation, and she is terrific too.

Once I started book two, I took on a second Beta who is an avid reader of mine that I insisted on becoming friends with and whom I adore. He has been invaluable in vetting certain things I really can’t experience for myself, and his literary insight is fantastic. I treasure him. I call him my “Is this possible” Beta but I probably need to come up with a better name. :-D

The long and short of this is that anything I publish I have been over at a minimum six times, if it’s particularly emotional, possibly more times than that, so I am really proud of all of it. I went from “Oh dear what if anyone reads this how embarrassing” to “This is the best art I have ever made” in the span of about six weeks, and I have no compunctions about discussing any of it, enthusiastically, with almost anyone. :-)

**Are there any tools, resources, or habits that you've picked up that you find help you with your writing process?**

I find google docs invaluable, although it struggles once you hit five hundred pages or so. I like that I can go machine to machine to phone and read or work on it seamlessly across devices.

I tried scrivener but the learning curve was too steep and it doesn’t move from machine to machine, nor do I love the way it displays on my 4k monitor.

I very much like Aeon Timeline software, that one is helping me a lot with some of my more intricate plot timelines.

**How do you overcome writer's block?**

I set that part aside and immediately work on something else. If I’m stuck on a chapter I either circle back to work on something I was stuck on yesterday or move somewhere else in the timeline to start a new chapter and I work on those until I have inspiration to move forward on the spot I was stuck on. This would be absolutely impossible for me if I were a pantser but I always have at least a rough outline of any piece I am working on. A walk or another activity that uses my hands and lets my brain wander, like doing the dishes or the laundry piling up, will often knock something loose as well.

**If you write for a living or for other venues that are NOT fan-fiction, tell us how they differ or how they are the same. Do you approach them differently or use your same processes?**

I don’t but I’d like to eventually, and I think my current process will come with me.

**What's been the most challenging thing you've encountered writing fan-fiction?**

Finding enough time to write. By the time I started writing fan fiction there was hardly any stigma anymore about it being a “lesser” art form though that seems to have been a thing for a long time. Oh wait, my number one pet peeve has been that anyone outside of fandom who asks what I’ve been doing with my time, the second I say I’ve been writing a fan fiction book they *immediately* ask if I can change the names and sell it. *Immediately*. And then I have to explain, with varying success of communication with each person, that I wrote this to make *these characters* happy, and if I change their names, it’s not *these characters* anymore, IS IT. :-)

**What's been the most rewarding thing you've encountered writing fan-fiction?**

Besides having the finished work to read, which helps soothe my insomnia and anxiety, the friendships I’ve made during the course of asking friends to Beta for me, and then getting to know some of my readers have been an absolute delight. I published my first work serially, every Friday, over the course of nine months while I was writing the second half of it, and having those interactions to discuss the work with people who also fell in love with it and took that journey with me was an absolutely magical experience. I’m pouring all of my humanity into writing, so it feels like the people who resonate with my work are in some ways resonating with me, with my heart and soul and existential anguish, and I treasure each and every one of them.

**What would you like people who don't read or otherwise participate in fan-fiction or fan works to know about this community?**

That it is vibrant, and thriving, and I have read fan works that rival or surpass traditionally published novels in every possible way.

**What would you like people who only read/consume fan-fiction to know about writing fic?**

I would like people who read fanfic without writing any to understand that writing is a lonely process almost always done in a vacuum, and that it takes hours and hours of toil for every page. The work you are consuming in two hours may have taken fifty or a hundred hours to write, and that if you can PLEASE take the time to write a comment, or at least give a kudo, because those tiny sentences that straggle in are our only form of payment and if you love an author’s work and *don’t* leave comments they may not write anything else for you. I don’t know any artists who aren’t petulant and needy at least SOMETIMES and no one pays money for fanfiction, so the entire transaction is hundreds of hours of toil for your several hours of enjoyment, and if you don’t leave a comment or a kudo or SOMEthing, I, for one, resent you. Speaking only for myself, you are still welcome to read my work, but you have not fueled your artist with any response or recompense for all that toil and soul bled onto the page and there have been stretches where I hole up with my betas and don’t publish things, and I bet I’m not alone there. ANYway, if you loved something, say something, it takes less than a minute and the work you’ve just consumed may have taken YEARS to finish. Thanks. :-D


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